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Meta-regression models are commonly used to synthesize and compare effect sizes. Unfortunately, traditional meta-regression methods are ill-equipped to handle the complex and often unknown correlations among non-independent effect sizes. Robust variance estimation (RVE) is a recently proposed meta-analytic method for dealing with dependent effect sizes. The robumeta package provides functions for performing robust variance meta-regression using both large and small sample RVE estimators under various weighting schemes. These methods are distribution free and provide valid point estimates, standard errors and hypothesis tests even when the degree and structure of dependence between effect sizes is unknown.
Fisher et al. (Sat,) studied this question.